


Is This the Real Life

by halloweenjack21st



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-26
Updated: 2017-01-26
Packaged: 2018-09-20 00:46:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9468005
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halloweenjack21st/pseuds/halloweenjack21st
Summary: What might have happened as a result of the events of the episode "Eye of the Needle".





	

The Doctor sat in the empty sick bay in the empty ship, completely immobile, resisting the urge to drum his fingers on the desktop. He had started to believe, for no real reason, that if he stayed absolutely still, eventually the ship's systems would deactivate him. Apparently, ancient computers were set to go into something called "energy saver mode" after a period of inactivity, and he hoped against hope that his own program had something similar. Countering this hope was an entirely irrational urge to drum his fingers. Or was it entirely irrational? The sound that his holographic digits made on the desktop would drown out the sounds that he thought he could detect just on the edge of audibility, somewhere beyond the sick bay door. He'd spent several hours yesterday crouched at the threshold of the open door, sick bay lights dimmed, listening for any sound that might be coming from the darkened corridor outside. He knew that there was slim chance of any sound being carried by the thin inert gas that now filled Voyager's decks, even if there was something out there. But still... 

He wondered if this was what going insane was like for an artificial intelligence. He had no data on the subject. He could identify and distinguish between any number of behavioral disorders for any number of sentient species, including some illnesses which no longer really existed because they'd been cured or mitigated by Federation science, but records of corresponding mental diseases for AIs was scant, in part because many of the early experiments in artificial intelligence in the Federation had ended badly. He found himself wondering if the worst thing would be that it would be impossible for him to go mad, that he might end up having to spend dozens of millenia fully aware, not even able to sleep. 

And the worst part was, he couldn't even find it in himself to hate Neelix, or Kes, or the captain, for what they had done to bring things to this point. He'd even been happy for them, albeit tinged with sadness. He had no illusions about the necessity of his existence; he was fully aware that it would have been possible for him to have never been activated--with a fully-staffed medical department aboard Voyager, there would have been no need. Nor was it really a possibility for B'Elanna or the other engineers to take the time to kludge together some way of extracting his program from the sickbay holographic systems; they had no idea of whether the wormhole would stay open, or whether the Romulans would change their minds about taking the crew aboard. He was just happy that they thought that his program was worth saving at all. He had Kes to thank for that; she'd made the case to the captain that the EMH more than met the Turing test and that destroying Voyager after they'd left would amount to shortening the trip of most of the crew by murdering its most vulnerable member. Janeway strongly resisted this interpretation of the Doctor's existence, but eventually had to admit that even the chance that Kes was correct rendered the question moot. The problem then became, how to get the Doctor back to the Federation?

As it turned out, getting a completely uncrewed starship (or one in which the crew was in cryogenic storage, say) across vast distances was one of the scenarios that Starfleet had gamed out, inspired by refugees from the Eugenics Wars who had done the same with a relatively primitive spaceship. Voyager had an advantage in that it had a robust capacity for self-repair in many of its systems, in line with its design as a long-range science vessel. Its energy consumption would be greatly reduced if it didn't have to provide life support or artificial gravity, and its fuel would easily be replenished by the Bussard collectors on the nacelles. However, this long-term low-maintenance cruising mode came at a severe cost to the ship's speed; the warp drive simply could not operate without crewed supervision or regular maintenance stops at drydocks or other appropriate facilities. Which led to the other horn of the dilemma: the ship also had to have its autopilot programmed to avoid other ships or populated systems if it were to have any hope of arriving in the Alpha Quadrant intact, without Federation technology falling into the wrong hands. This meant that the ship would have to travel under impulse power, just under the speed of light, accelerating to just under c and then coasting across the galaxy, only cutting in its engines as needed to avoid being detected or captured by the Borg or whomever. Going this way, the ship would theoretically take 75,000 years to cross the galaxy. Janeway assured the Doctor that it was extremely unlikely that the ship would be unattended to for that long; she believed that the Federation would end up developing a workable transwarp drive within the next century or so, and that between their taking the knowledge of Voyager's likely path with them, and the ship's onboard transponders that would respond to subspace hails from the right people, they might possibly retrieve the ship within the lifetimes of its former crew. 

The Doctor took all this in stride, breezily informing the captain that it didn't matter whether he was inactivated for seventy-five minutes or seventy-five millenia, from his perspective. Inwardly, he felt sad at the idea of the current crew--who had started to grow on him, despite his best efforts to discourage that familiarity--being long dead and gone, probably, before he was reactivated, not to mention that his technology (and, possibly, medical knowledge) being obsolete by then, but, he thought to himself, there were worse things. He braced himself, and Kes deactivated him. 

Whatever he imagined he'd see when he was reactivated, it certainly wasn't Neelix standing in front of him, cradling his arm. The Talaxian had been rushing to take what he could with him, and had knocked some crates onto his arm; he was afraid that it might be broken, and didn't want to spend who knows how long on a Romulan ship (possibly in detention, if the Romulans were more than normally inquisitive) with a bone fracture. The Doctor scanned him, treated the bruising, which was all that it turned out to be, and turned around to find an analgesic suitable for Talaxians while lecturing him about carelessness and hypochondria. He heard the sick bay door open and close behind him, and asked the new visitor to wait a moment. Not that long after, he turned around, and the sick bay was empty. He stood there for several seconds--seconds he would later rue immensely--and started looking around the sick bay for Neelix, who had often poked and prodded around the various drawers and cabinets, much to the Doctor's irritation. Starting to feel dread, the Doctor touched his combadge and called for Neelix, only to hear a chirping from near the exam table, and realized that Neelix had left his tunic, with the combadge still on it, in the sick bay. The Doctor tried calling the transporter room, the captain, anybody.

No response.

And now the Doctor sat, wondering about the future and whether he'd have one and whether having one would be worse than not having one. He'd even been tortured by one feeble, flickering ray of hope when the ship had been boarded by Vidiians; he'd been so shocked by their appearance that he'd said nothing, just stood there open-mouthed as they scanned him, then beamed away before he could scream at them to turn him off, although he did that anyway, for a while after they'd left. Some of the crew had worried about the ship being raided by the Kazon or others before they'd beamed away, but now that was his only possibility for salvation from ceaseless consciousness; he wouldn't even mind being absorbed into the Borg Collective. He drummed his fingers and contemplated, with growing anger, the carelessness of Neelix, of Kes, of Janeway, of the designers who had planned his holoemitters with an independent and long-lived power supply, just like the ones on the holodeck, and--

...the holodeck.

At first the Doctor didn't want to even try the holodeck controls. After all, he'd known that Starfleet had put in various countermeasures to prevent a rogue AI from taking over the ship. But they'd left him a loophole a parsec wide to walk through: he was a Starfleet program, and thus not recognized as an intruding program, and since they'd also not recognized that he was sentient, there was no problem with his program requesting access to the holodeck. And just like that, there he was. In their haste to get the crew through the wormhole, all the attention that the officers had given to the holodeck was to make sure that nobody--no organic crewmembers, that is--was left in it. They pretty much left it unlocked.

Of course, once he was in, there was nothing there but holoprojectors lining the walls, so the Doctor asked the ship to reactivate the last running program. This turned out to be some place called "Sandrine's", a small and slightly run-down bar with an interesting selection of patrons, a proprietress who paid an undue amount of attention to him, and another woman who inquired after Mr. Paris. Of course, the Doctor thought to himself as he declined offers of drinks and companionship and briefly diverted himself with a table-based game that required a very modest knowledge of applied physics to master. He'd actually had a conversation with Paris about holoprograms favored by the crew; although the Doctor strove to appear supercilious regarding the organic crew's entertainment preferences, he'd been secretly fascinated by their use of holograms, his own physical basis for being. He had asked Paris why he and the other crew preferred relatively mundane recreations of the real world, past and present, over some of the more imaginative, even surrealistic environments and scenarios possible with a holodeck system. Why settle for reality when so much more was possible, the Doctor wanted to know?

Paris had shrugged, in that mildly irritatingly casual way that he had, and said, "I dunno, Doc. There are plenty of holoprograms like that around, and most people try some of them, or a bunch of them, when they're younger. I remember one that I found that was based in this odd belief system of an ancient cult called the 'Bronies.'" He paused. "Kind of liked that one, actually. But as most people get older, they tend to go more for something that's different, but not that different. Maybe it's from the past, but the past of their own planet, at least. Or... or it's from some point in your own past in which you did something, or didn't do something, that you wished you hadn't, or had. And you get to see what your life would have been like, if you'd done just that one little thing differently, or someone else had, or whatever." Paris looked thoughtful for a few seconds. "If you can stand to, that is. Or you just go back to some place where you wished you could stay forever. That works, too." 

The Doctor thought about that as he sank the eight ball and gave the cue to a waiting customer. His problem was that he had no particular place in his past that he wanted to go, because he barely had a past, and it was all aboard this ship, where he was stuck for literally ages. He started skimming over the list of available programs, mentally noting how complex each one was, and starting to dismally realize that, even if he worked his way through every available plot path in every available program, they wouldn't last him a century. Then he came across one scenario marked "Insurrection Alpha" that was flagged "incomplete" and opened it up. He found himself on the engineering deck--or, as he quickly realized, a flawless simulation of it--but in which the crew members were standing still, with glowing lines leading from each crew to a list of names hovering in the air next to them. He went up to Jonas, poked at a name at random, and watched as the ex-Maquis changed to Seska. 

This is a work in progress, he thought to himself, and started exploring the GUI, realizing as he did so that this was probably similar to the tool that Lewis Zimmerman had used to create him back at Jupiter Station. He quickly realized that the scenario had been created by Tuvok, and almost as quickly realized that, if anyone were likely to have locked things down before abandoning ship, it would have been the meticulous Vulcan security chief. A bit of exploring the holodeck file system revealed the cause of the security lapse: the project had been hacked into by Seska. This not only made the project available, but also many of the files that Tuvok had been using to create it, including crew dossiers and even--could it be?--personal logs, as well as surprisingly detailed files on the Maquis. (Seska's dossier was mostly blank, although the Doctor noted that the hacking tool that she had used to break into Tuvok's files was partly written in Cardassian trinary code.) The scenario was meant to be a training tool for Tuvok's security team to prepare for a possible Maquis mutiny, and he had intended for it to be as realistic as possible by including not only the likely behavior of the Maquis, but the Starfleet crew as well, including himself. For only having been back on the ship a relatively short time before leaving it, Tuvok had made a surprising amount of progress on his scenario; it was soon apparent that he had been aided by several built-in expert systems capable of extrapolating likely behavior from known data. These systems could, theoretically, do the same with any new data. Say, for example, the ship came across a new species; the expert systems could not only predict, to some extent, their behavior from known information about them--physiology, language, ship design, and so on--but also guess at the plausible behavior of the crew in reaction to them.

The Doctor contemplated his new toy. So many possibilities... He thought that he himself potentially had the imagination to create new scenarios himself; after all, his own program was capable of some creativity--he'd already needed to use it to transplant a lung between individuals of two species that he was barely acquainted with. The question was, what did he want to use it for? What did he really want? 

The answer seemed incredibly obvious. As Paris had said, he wanted what he knew, what he was familiar with... with one small yet crucial difference. He saw no reason why it couldn't be done. In fact, there was a plot-randomizing option that presented some tantalizing options. The imaginary voyage might last only a few years; it might last for decades, or centuries. The ship could become a multigenerational ship, adding new technologies and crew as they went along. They might even make peaceful use of Borg technology, increasing the ship's size and power until it was the size of a small moon. The only real question was, would it really be satisfying, knowing what he knew? He looked at the holoprogram editing tool manual again, and saw that, yes, he could make the necessary change to his own program. 

***

"Doctor?"

The Doctor turned to look at Kes. "Yes?"

"You looked a bit, I don't know, preoccupied there for a moment." 

The Doctor paused. What had he been thinking about? Oh, yes. "Sorry, I was just woolgathering there for a moment. That recent thing with the wormhole... I was contemplating what it would have been like if the temporal shift hadn't been there and the crew had left the ship, and me, behind." 

"Oh, Doctor. You know that I would have hated to have had to do that. And I'm sure that someone would have turned off your program before we left." 

"No doubt, I..." The Doctor trailed off as, for just a moment, something like a pop-up menu appeared next to Kes' head. It looked oddly familiar, but he couldn't place it. 

"Doctor? Are you sure you're all right?"

"Fit as a fiddle, as they say. But maybe Lieutenant Torres could take a look at my program soon. After all, we... we have a long voyage ahead of us."


End file.
